“… would anybody become a writer, if they realized at the outset what the working hours were? There are no hiding places either; there’s nowhere to hang out, figuratively speaking, and sneak a crafty cigarette. You are never safe from the marauding idea, and no matter how dull or drained you feel, your book has eyes everywhere. Sometimes, I daren’t go out of the house in case I see something that starts off a chain of those damned sentences. They have me fettered in their service, and I suspect I would be their servant even if they paid no wages. There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.”
That’s a great quote from Hilary Mantel’s last book, A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing, a collection of her essays and reviews from her last forty years. Mantel wrote on so many different subjects, all of them sharply observed. “If you don’t want your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all,” she said. A piece of advice–and maybe a warning–from someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly. Fifteen years ago I read her novel A Change of Climate, which mined her own experiences making the transition from South Africa to England. I barely knew her work then and thought it was an excellent novel: a complex family story written by a writer I needed to follow. Wolf Hall a few years later took me by surprise; I didn’t realize that historical fiction was her calling, but her first novel was A Place of Greater Safety, a panoramic story set during the French Revolution.
There’s lots of material about writing in this new collection of essays, all worthwhile. I’m so sorry she’s gone and we won’t read anything new from her. She had a singular, wide-ranging intellect.
A Reader's Place 
As ever, informative and makes me want to dive in to Mantel’s Life in Writing. Thank you!